This Guy Built His Own iPhone 5 “Design Prototype”

Oh, you think you’re a hardcore Apple fan? Sure, you might have plastered the back window of your hybrid with Apple stickers. Yeah, you’ve got something MG Jobs said painted on the wall above your bed. Hell, you even named your first daughter McKenzie, just so you could call her “Mac”.

But this guy milled his own iPhone 5 prototype, based on nothing but rumors and speculation. Just so he could see what it was like. Yeah. Bar raised.

The project comes from the guys over at Germany’s Benm.at. They began with some CAD designs, mockups that had been passed around, and the supposed case leaks we’ve seen so much of.

They boiled all of that into a 3D model, which they then used to cook up their own “design prototype”. They milled it out of a single piece of aluminum, and even blasted the back with glass pearls to give it the same texture as the back of the iPad. Crazy, right? For obvious reasons (namely, that the guy isn’t.. you know, Apple’s engineering team), the prototype is just for looks — it doesn’t actually function in any way.

Of course, odds are relatively good that the actual next iPhone — be it called the iPhone 4S, the iPhone 5, or whatever — won’t look anything like this. For every “Oh my god! Radical new design!” rumor, there’s a “Nope, next iPhone looks exactly the same.” rumor. The rumor mill has spewed out contradicting stories on even the most mundane of details. This “prototype” seems closely based on ThisIsMyNext’s mockup that went around a few months ago; alas, just about every detail of that mockup has been negated by one rumor or another.